Saturday, April 19, 2008

Umbrella = Paraply

P.S. added on April 20, 2008

Trust me on this one, this is a serious post! :-)

You probably don't need me to explain what the hit song Umbrella by Rihanna is. As usual, I'm late with trends and I only discovered that song a few weeks ago while walking in the mall. ("So that's the umbrella song everybody's been talking about!") My initial reaction was that it has one of the silliest refrains ("under my umbrella, ella ella eh eh eh"). I still think that, but you must admit that even the rest of the song is technically difficult to sing, even more so with feeling. Makes you want to admire Rihanna, actually.

But! but! but! Looking in the internet for some spoofs of Umbrella, I actually found an unexpectedly brilliant Swedish version! My disbelief that it wasn't a spoof (it's on MTV?!) was soon replaced by a realization that it was being performed by really serious artists! I mean, they're quite sensitive guys it seems – even the organist has "that sensitive artist expression" from time to time, and the singer's affected voice and pained sad-puppy expression just makes a moving interpretation of the original song. They are singing about friendship throughout the worst possible hardships, right? ;-) Yeah, but listen to it a couple of times, it's actually really good! (Though I must still admit that Rihanna definitely has better voice quality).

So here's the original video of Umbrella sung by Rihanna:

...and the Swedish version Paraply by David Olof Peter Pagmar a.k.a. Montt mardié:

P.S. Since Lea asked how Swedish hard metal sounds like (a so-called hard metal i.e. hard rock metal version of Umbrella by band Lillasyster has supposedly gained popular in Scandinavia, Germany and Thailand), I had to look in YouTube for the answer (Video in this link.)

It sounds... awful. >:-P

I say, never trust the taste of folk who listen to David Hasselhoff. (Shudder!)

4 Comments:

hahaha. really good one. i can;t figure out either if the swedish dudes are serious or just going for the irony...on a side note--a text message got forwarded to me with a filipino translation of "umbrella"--and the lyrics are actually rather decent, compared to so much of the tripe out there masquerading as song lyrics.

A lot of Swedish words are borrowed from German and French -- you might even be surprised when you get here how much Swedish you can understand ;-) (German helped especially in figuring what things were at the grocery!)

Yeah I rather like Umbrella myself, hehe. It kind of grows on you, and Rihanna's voice is admirable. Oh, but did you know the song was originally written for Britney? Good ole' wikipedia. Haha ;-)

Medyo swede cheese-y yung video hehe. anyway also looked at wikipedia and apparently there's a swedish ahrd metal version of the song which is supposed to be really popular. what does swedish hard metal sound like??